Steve Jobs; The quotes that touched me

Steve Jobs has died. It is a huge loss for the tech industry and marks the loss of an icon. With each icons death, however, comes the opportunity for someone to fill their void. Or, better yet, strive to be better. A better person. A better role model. A better innovator. A new icon. Below are some quotes from Steve Jobs that have inspired me. Perhaps they’ll inspire you as well.

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

-Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech

“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”

-Steve Jobs, 2006

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

-Steve Jobs, 1998 Business Week Interview

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

-Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech

“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”

-Steve Jobs, 2003 60 Minutes

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

-Steve Jobs, 1996 Wired Interview

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. … Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

-Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech

“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

The bio is great. One minute I am astounded at the way he treated people and by the next page I’m in awe of his vision and ability to make incredible business decisions. I find the latter to be so inspiring and motivating. I’m highlighting on my kindle like never before! I highly recommend it–it’s amazing insight into Jobs and the tech world in general. It leaves me quite torn because he really didn’t treat people well–the exact opposite of the kind of person I try to be. The flip side of that is we can learn from every aspect of the person Jobs was.

You raise a good point. I suppose when you analyze the life of someone like Jobs you need to focus on either his professional life or his personal life. It’s pretty clear he was a bit of a deadbeat husband and father but he was a good business man a great visionary. So…

Yes great business man…but that’s why I say strive to be better than him….. we cannot all be born with the brains to do what he did….but we can all be good people if we put our hearts into it. Raise your children properly…. treat your neighbors well. I respect that much much more than inventing an ipod.